Mlb

If you visit MLB.com, the official website for Major League Baseball, click on a tab marked "stats." You can waste a few hours of your life comparing the career accomplishments of the greatest players in baseball history.

With another click on a statistical category, home runs for example, the software gives you the leaders in any form you'd like, by season, by league, by team or for an entire career.

If you need a reminder about which player hit more home runs than any other player, you can use this stat tool. Just to review, that man is Barry Bonds. He hit 762 home runs in his career. No player hit more.

Bonds drove in more runs than any other man (1,996) save two, some guys named Aaron and Ruth. Bonds walked more than any other man (2,558), is fourth all-time in OPS (which is a combination of on-base percentage and slugging), is sixth in slugging (.607), 14th in doubles (601), 35th in hits (2,935), and in what I consider the most important statistical category of all, Bonds is third all-time in runs scored (2,227), behind Ricky Henderson and a fellow called Cobb.

I did the same thing for a player named Roger Clemens. His stats were pretty good, too. Clemens is ninth all-time in wins (354) and third in strikeouts (4,672), behind Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson.

This is just a guess on my part, but if you were to look strictly at numbers, one might presume that this Bonds fellow and this Clemens dude are among the greatest men to ever play the game of baseball.

And yet in a vote by members of a group called the Baseball Writers Association of America, Bonds and Clemens were deemed unfit to take their place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Let me ask a few questions:

Did Bonds or Clemens ever fail a drug test? No.

Have Bonds or Clemens ever been banned from baseball? No.

Does Major League Baseball still consider the career statistics for both Bonds and Clemens valid totals? Yes.

Even amid rampant accusations that both players used banned substances during their careers, did Bonds and Clemens continue to draw a paycheck from professional teams? Did baseball owners, general managers, team managers trot them out on the field to perform? Did they earn victories for their teams? Yes, yes and yes.

Did sportswriters continue to cover games played by Bonds and Clemens and fill their newspapers with stories of their exploits? That would again be yes and yes.

Did Major League Baseball completely ignore the issue of performance-enhancing drugs issue even as player stats became absurdly bloated? Yes.

Was Major League Baseball the slowest of all major sports to react to PEDs? Yes.

I am no fan of Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. I detest the use of PEDs that has tarnished our era of professional baseball. But the recent vote by the BBWAA, which denied Bonds and Clemens entry into the Hall of Fame, is staggeringly hypocritical.

Baseball allowed this to happen. Baseball looked the other way because fans loved the home run and the owners loved sold-out stadiums. Fortunes were made off the exploits of Bonds and Clemens. Sportswriters happily trotted around after the big stars, filled papers and magazines with stories. But only now do they take a stand and say that these players are not worthy of sports immortality.

Everyone saw the bulging biceps, the statistical anomalies and the assault on the record books, and no one did anything about it.

Please, don't bombard me with e-mails that say steroid users belong in the Hall of Shame, not the Hall of Fame. Spare me comments that no one forced these guys to cheat. I agree with you. They are scoundrels. These guys aren't heroes, but rather anti-heroes of professional sports.

If we all agree that these players cheated the game, if we do not respect their statistical record, then the games they won for their teams should also be invalidated.

Every win by Clemens in a Red Sox or Yankees uniform, for example, should now be forfeit. Every game won by Bonds with a home run should be forfeit.

If we take away a Tour de France title from a cyclist because he used drugs, then should we do the same with World Series championships and pennants won by teams that employed the cheats amid all the allegations?

Are we courageous enough to make that decision? Are we truly willing to cleanse this sullied era? Of course not, so this lame vote by a pack of vigilante sportswriters seems all the more pathetic.

As long as Bonds' and Clemens' numbers count, as long as we accept that these statistics are part of baseball's permanent record, then blocking their entry into Cooperstown is an empty and cowardly gesture.

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